At the community entrance, there’s that scrap collection station. Old Sun wears a straw hat, with a weight hanging on the handlebar of his tricycle. Cardboard costs eight mao a jin, and pull-tab cans are one mao each. He’s been collecting scrap for ten years, and this year he started collecting a new thing—blockchain.

$RAVE ‌
During the New Year, his son came back from Shenzhen, installed a wallet on his phone, and transferred two thousand yuan worth of coins. “Dad, keep this. It’s called $RAVE , better than saving in a bank.” Old Sun doesn’t understand what $RAVE is, so his son said, “Just think of it as saving a pile of scrap iron. When iron prices go up, sell it.” Old Sun understood that—he’s familiar with scrap iron. The year before last, scrap iron was 1.20 yuan, last year 0.80 yuan, and this year 0.60 yuan. He knows the fluctuations well.

So every day, he pedals his tricycle to collect paper and cardboard, then comes back and squats beside the scrap pile to watch his phone. The cardboard is flattened and bundled, the pull-tab cans are crushed and bagged. After finishing, he takes out his phone to check $RAVE . A neighbor asks what he’s looking at, and he says scrap iron. The neighbor leans over to take a peek and says, “Green, scrap iron has dropped.” He replies, “Yeah, it’s the same price as cardboard now.”

Later, RAVE kept falling. From two yuan down to one, from one down to fifty mao. Old Sun watches every day, then puts his phone back on the scale. The scale shows 0.00, and he says, “Look, even the scale doesn’t want it.”

Yesterday, passing by, he was unloading a truckload of cardboard. His phone on the handlebar was lit, RAVE jumped to 0.43. After unloading, he wiped his sweat with a towel, looked at his phone, then locked the screen and put it in his pocket. He reached under the seat and took out a snake-skin bag, filled with pull-tab cans he’d collected over half a year, crushed and neatly stacked. He lifted it, weighed it, and said, “This bag is worth two thousand RAVE.”

He put the cans on the scale, which showed twenty jin with the weight on the weight. Then he took out his phone, and right in front of me, deleted that wallet. “Keeping it just takes up memory. Might as well store a few more pictures of cardboard, at least I won’t feel bad when I look at them.”